


Those Complicated Words

by Dorkangel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Incredible Hulk - All Media Types, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Avengers Family, Awesome Pepper Potts, BAMF Natasha, Bruce Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Complicated Relationships, Darcy is the fandom bicycle and I love it, Deaf Clint Barton, Everyone Is Poly Because Avengers, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Insecure Clint, M/M, Maximoffs are here, Multi, Natasha Romanov Joins SHIELD, Poor Bruce, Protective Pepper, Protective Steve, Romantic Fluff, SHIP DARCY WITH ALL THE THINGS, Sam Wilson is a Gift, Sam Wilson is a Saint, Snarky Maximoffs, Soulmates, Steve Has Issues, Tony Has Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Up all night to get Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-20
Updated: 2015-04-20
Packaged: 2018-03-25 00:35:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3790015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dorkangel/pseuds/Dorkangel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone has a soulmate out there somewhere. Thing is, there are always problems trying to meet them.<br/>Nine problems with soulmates, and a happy ending for everyone with only five solutions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Complicated Words

**Author's Note:**

> A soulmate AU, for those who don't know, goes something like this:  
> You have the first words that your soulmate ever says to you written somewhere on your body, so that when you meet them you'll know. Easy!

**The Problems:**

"How did you lose it?"  
Bucky glanced up at the words, and swallowed hard. The old woman was the only other person on the bus, and she seemed completely harmless, so it wasn't like he could attack her to shut her up.  
He knew she wasn't talking about his arm. People only got that look of horror on their face when they saw the scar across his wrist where his soulmate mark used to be.  
"I don't know." he croaked.  
"Do you remember what it said?"  
Her voice was twisted in concern, and he shook his head.  
After that, neither of them spoke.

*

Darcy used to _hate_ her soulmate mark. It appeared when she was ten, curling around her wrist with a sensation like someone painting on the words, gently... And then again, on her shoulder.  
Two marks.  
"My soulmate's a klutz." she had announced to her mom the next morning. "See? 'Shit, sorry. I'm sorry.'."  
"Oh, let me see!"  
She thought knew exactly how it would happen, when she was a kid. One day she'd be walking along, and some handsome, built, jogger guy would knock into her and turn around and say it, and then she'd say his words and they'd kiss and get married and be together forever. Sometimes it was a woman in her childhood fantasies, since the soul mark didn't seem to specify any gender, but not so often, because the one that she kept hidden - the one of her shoulder - said 'Excuse him'.  
She had two soulmates.  
Darcy's mom was a little conservative, so she kept it to herself. She didn't even google it, for fear of her Internet history being seen.  
Until she was thirteen and she worked out how to do an incognito window, because then she was all over it.  
_The earliest recorded case of a person having two soul marks_ , Wikipedia informed her, _was a Mr. Thomas Green of York, England_. There were even photos of them - 'Sir, your hat!' and 'I doubt you will ever retrieve it' - and a note that his soulmates were revealed to be twin sisters visiting from Edinburgh. _Having two soul marks is not a disease or a malfunction,_ it read. _They generally mean that your soulmates are siblings or very close friends._  
So, yeah. Darcy was only a little weird, and it was actually kind of cool that she was one in a million. The Internet also said that people with the same soulmate have the same soul marks.

And then there was the whole thing with the internship and Thor and the men in suits, and then London, and then back to New York. She was beginning to think she was never going to meet her soulmates, not with all the crazy shit happening. She even had a nightmare that the klutzy one was going to hit her with a car and then run out and say 'shit sorry'.

*

Wanda and Pietro's soulmate marks appeared at exactly the same time, on the exact same place, and said exactly the same thing. 'Jesus fucking Christ!'.  
It hurt that they were trapped in the rubble of their apartment building with no marks, forced to just stay there and try not to think about their parents or their future or the bomb just feet away, they were rescued, and when they woke up in a hospital and they had their soulmate marks looping around their ankles.  
"Maybe they're different people," Wanda had suggested, years later. "Who just say the same thing."  
The pair of them came to the conclusion, all too quickly, that it wasn't. The writing was the same.  
"I think we surprise them." chuckled Pietro, and got a smile back.  
"Our words are probably first."  
"Must be."

HYDRA didn't like them to acknowledge their soul marks, so it was easy to forget until they ended up in America, with the Avengers.

*

When he was a kid, Clint didn't speak Hungarian. So when his soul mark appeared, he was quite confused. 'Engedj el' was, he eventually found out, 'Let go of me'.  
He had a brief period of time, when he was a kid, when he was totally deaf from one of his dad's blows. That had been the most terrifying thing for him, because no matter how alone he was, Clint knew that one day he'd grab someone Hungarian and they say his words and everything'd turn out alright... unless he didn't hear them say it.  
His hearing returned gradually, and a few simple operations from SHIELD fixed it completely. They asked him to go on a mission to Budapest shortly after he joined, and he was kind of ecstatic.

*

Natasha kept hers covered, which was easy enough given that it was on the small of her back, and never looked at it if she help help it. In the Red Room they had covered them to hide their humanity, but she had always had a personal terror that 'No, wait!' (In English, which was weird because she was Russian) was the dying stutter of someone she had killed. Her words came when she was nine, which was sort of early, but she had already been with HYDRA for three years at that point. Natasha didn't know any other life, and she might have been desperate for her soulmate to swoop in and save her, but she decided quickly enough that she would just have to save herself.  
So she ran.  
Just because she escaped the KGB, didn't mean she stopped killing. The words kept burning guiltily into her back as she did, but that didn't stop her.  
There was a target in Budapest that needed terminating.

*

Steve's soulmate mark was something of a private joke among him and his friends. The Commandos had thought it was funny enough, and Bucky had practically collapsed laughing when it first appeared.  
'Who the hell is Bucky?'  
"Apparently I think my soulmate is you, and then they're not and it offends them." he had hummed, and Bucky just kept laughing until he gave himself a stitch.  
He only told the Howling Commandos after a mission they'd failed, and needed cheering up from. It worked, suffice to say, even if the falling about and giggling kind of hurt his self-esteem.  
"Maybe it's a lady." suggested Jim. "I'd be offended if I were a girl and some idiot thought I looked like Barnes."  
He and Peggy got pretty close, but they weren't soulmates. She had some kind of waitress-ish question up her calf, and his stuck out on his collar bone.

His last thought, as he plunged into the ice, was of regret that he'd never meet whoever wasn't Bucky.

*

Who the hell would want Tony as a soulmate? He was drunk, he was unreliable, he was unpredictable, he had had sex with approximately eight three percent of the people he knew.  
Uh. Eight three point two, as of last night.  
His head pounded, and he whined against the desk that he had fallen asleep under.  
"Sir," came JARVIS's voice, as dry as usual. "Obadiah Stane is outside the door, with the new PA."  
Tony couldn't find it in him to reply, so just curled up into a ball of hungover-ness and hoped like hell that he would never hear the words 'Mr Stark, I'm Pepper. Remember?'.  
"Tony," came Obi's voice, half-amused and slimy. "You alive under there? I've got someone to introduce."  
He groaned and clutched his head.  
"I'll come back tomorrow, then." said Obi, and lead whoever-it-was out with a click of heels.

*

Bruce's soulmate was Betty Ross. He knew it the moment they met as adults, and so did she, and the feeling of being complete was beautiful.  
But she didn't want to stay with a monster. The Other Guy scared her away, and ruined his one chance at love forever.

When people found out why exactly he got low, they didn't usually know how to reply.

*

It was kind of hard not to feel like a freak when the whole world was telling you that meeting your soulmate was  _everything_ , and you _didn't have one_.  
Sam was just born without a soulmate mark, ok? It didn't mean that there was no one out there for him, just that fate decided not to give him any clues as to their identity. He did his best not to watch romantic movies, or even movies with romantic subplots, and other than that people just assumed his words are somewhere hidden.  
He joined the army and actually met some other people like him for the first time. If you didn't have a soulmate, the government was, apparently, all too happy for you to to volunteer as cannon fodder.

*

**The Solutions:**

Bucky was running. There was fire, which in fairness was his fault because he had thrown petrol on the helicopters, and then a match, and in front of him was the man who had been on the bridge.  
"Wait!" he yelled, and Bucky was scared and he didn't know why, so he twisted around to run the other way, but there was a man there with metal wings there and an explosion, and before he knew it he was huddled under a shield with the _man on the bridge_.  
"It's ok," murmured the man. "It's ok, I've got you."  
"I know you...?" Bucky asked, unsure. He felt a nod.  
"I'm your soulmate."  
Suddenly, a whole lot of things seemed to make sense.

*

Basically, the tower was a mess. Darcy was sure it wasn't meant to be _her_ job to clean it up - Tony had to have teams of people to do that, right? - so she was just kind of walking over the rubble and broken glass and trying to salvage whatever she could find of Jane's papers.  
"Fucking Ultron," she cursed, under her breath. There were some new additions to the team, apparently, but she had thus far managed to avoid them. Darcy had other things to do. "Smashing things, what a douche-"  
And there was a rush of wind and a blur, and her spreadsheets had flown everywhere.  
Before she could react, there was a young man with white-blonde hair (dark roots, though) skidding to a halt in front of her.  
"Shit, sorry!" he panted, grimacing apologetically. "I'm sorry."  
A woman with dark hair and a red dress appeared at the edge of the corridor, hurrying forward to join them. Darcy had stopped short at the sound of her soul mark in his accent.  
"Pietro, _idiot_." she hissed, and then turned to Darcy. "Excuse him."  
"Jesus fucking Christ!" she exclaimed, and then threw her hands over her mouth.  
They both froze and stared at her, and then she felt herself enveloped in a huge warm hug- first by the man and then the woman.  
"I thought I'd never meet you." she gulped, against what felt like a muscled pec. "I'm Darcy, by the way."  
"Pietro, and Wanda."

*

Clint had seen her in the ballroom, and he'd seen her slip a pill into the drink of an ambassador. He didn't stop her, because SHIELD had intel on that particular dignitary and he was a child-trafficking scumbag, but she glanced up as she did so and locked eyes with him.  
So she knew he had seen.  
Which was probably why she slipped away at the first chance she got, Clint following quickly, and hurried to the roof.  
He didn't expect a bullet flying at him the actual second he opened the door to the roof himself, but he dodged it easily enough, and from then on there were a lot of flying bullets. He noticed when she ran out of bullets too, because then there was the flash of a knife he had to block, and almost by chance he managed to grab her arm.  
" _Engedj el_!" she barked. Clint was so surprised that he reeled backwards, and she used the opportunity to send him crashing onto his back and hold a knife to his throat.  
"No," he spluttered, in English - because he was exhausted and in shock and far too generally overwhelmed to think in Hungarian. "Wait-"  
She froze, and he grabbed the knife out of her hands to clatter noisily across the rooftop. That didn't stop her from pinning his neck to the ground with her elbows, of course.  
"Why should I wait?" she hissed. "Do you know what I am?"  
"A Black Widow agent," he replied, doing his best to affect nonchalance while his life was very directly in danger. "Gone rogue. Well, rogue-er."  
"You were sent to kill me?"  
"Yes."  
She snorted in sharp laughter. "How's that working out for you?"  
"You're my soulmate."  
Those words seemed to do something... not good... to the inside of her head, because her eyes went wide and she relaxed off him a little. Clint sat up.  
"You're Natalia Romanova, born 1984, brought up in the Red Room."  
"Congratulations," she muttered dryly. "You've read my file."  
"You escaped at age eighteen."  
"I _defected_."  
"Wanna defect to SHIELD?" She sent him a dry stare, and he became suddenly serious. "Natalia. You can't run forever. Sooner or later, someone's going to find you and put you down, and I don't want that person to be me."  
"You're offering me my life?"  
Natalia still seemed ready to bolt, so he shifted and pulled up his sleeve to show the edge of his soul mark, just below his elbow.  
"I'm offering you a _new_ life."  
She could still have killed him. But... a fresh start, away from all the blood on her hands, with her soulmate. For a second, she almost felt like anybody else.

*

 _Anthony Stark_ , he thought to himself. _Child prodigy, industrial genius, billionaire inventor_. _Dead at twenty three of an overdose._  
If someone were to ask him to program the exact specifications for an AI, he wouldn't, but he could. If someone were to ask him what he'd taken, and how much, he wouldn't be able to answer.  
Still, he knew it was too much. His heart was failing, and before he'd even had a chance to finish JARVIS, so he couldn't call for help anywhere outside the house. He had collapsed, almost poetically, in the garage.  
_What the hell is that?_ He could hear a faint gasp, the hydraulic sound of the door opening, and then rapid footsteps towards him.  
There were hands on his shoulders, but he didn't see the point in opening his eyes. Tongue. Speech? No. Tongue not responding.  
He made a vague mumble, which he think sounded like a question.  
"Mr. Stark," called a stressed female voice. "I-I'm Pepper, remember? Virginia Potts. I'm the new PA."  
_No. No no no no nonono_. He couldn't meet his soulmate now.  
"Jus' let me die," he slurred. "Better off without me."  
She hesitated a moment above him, and then reached down with even stronger hands to pull him into the recovery position.  
"No. You're stronger than this- _I'm_ stronger than this. I'm not going to lose you just after I've found you."  
"You seem nice." he murmured, against the floor. "Y'should stay 'way from me. 'm toxic."  
"Tony." she snapped. "Listen to my voice. You're going to survive, and then I'm going to sort this mess out, do you understand? I wasn't given this job because I'm pretty. I am the most competent person on your staff."  
Suddenly, Tony did kind of want to survive. She sounded... sort of wonderful.  
He settled for lapsing into unconscious again and praying as he did that she'd be there when he woke up.

*

They met at the 'after party' for a mission. Bruce was glad he had helped and all, but the Other Guy took a lot out of him and shook him up a little inside, so he was folded into a corner in a comfortable sweater, nursing a non-alcoholic beer.  
"Careful there," joked a voice, and he looked up to see a face he vaguely recognised. "Don't wanna get completely smashed."  
"Ha ha." he deadpanned back. "It's Sam, right?"  
"Yeah, Sam Wilson. I've got wings."  
"Bruce Banner. I... turn into a monster."  
The guy took a seat next to him, smiling gently.  
"Don't be so hard on yourself. You save a lot of people, right?"  
"Kill a lot, too."  
"Well, you've got to have someone out there for you."  
Sam gestured towards the words that poked out of Bruce's sweater on his collar bone, and took a swig of his drink.  
Bruce shook his head glumly. "She didn't want to stay with me."  
"Ow, shit. That's hard, man."  
"It's fine."  
"I don't have any."  
Bruce looked up suddenly and stared at him.  
"Just born without any." shrugged Sam. He seemed pretty much at peace with it. "Joined the army and all, but I survived and got out."  
There was a certain feeling of guilt, Bruce thought, that came with sleeping with people who hadn't found their soulmate yet. It was like you were holding them away from their destiny, and you knew that sooner or later they'd find the person they were meant to be with and leave you.  
There wasn't that with Sam.  
"Hey," he said, slowly. "Do you want to go somewhere else?"

**Author's Note:**

> I should write an epilogue. It's not going to happen. They all lived happily ever after, the end.


End file.
